[Since the birth of our son, Archer, on March 1, 2002, folks have
been asking how we came up with the name. My wife is Jewish, so when
we wanted to name him in homor of her grandfather, Abraham, we had to use
the letter "A", but couldn't use the precise name (don't ask me why; I'm
a WASP). I wanted Abner, but was threatened with divorce, so I proposed
Archer, not telling her where I was deriving it from. The following
will explain why I liked it. It helps that Ross MacDonald's great
private eye is Lew Archer.]

It goes nearly without saying that The Adventures of Robin Hood
is one of the very best swashbucklers in Hollywood history. Errol
Flynn's archetypal star-turn as Robin so defined the genre that it lives
on through innumerable parodies and homages, including a classic Bugs Bunny
cartoon and Peter O'Toole's character in My Favorite Year.
In addition, the film features a host of great costars and character actors
from Hollywood's Golden Era : Claude Rains (Prince John); Basil Rathbone
(Guy of Gisbourne); Olivia de Havilland (Lady Marian); Alan Hale (Little
John); Eugene Pallette (Friar Tuck); Una O'Connor (Bess); and so on.
There are banquets and festivals, swordfights and courtships, and loyalty
and treacheries. But most of all, and I don't really understand why
this seems to surprise people, there's a political vision, one that shaped
Britain and thereby America, and which lives on today : that the legitimacy
of the state depends on the consent of the governed.

The Robin Hood story has taken many forms over the years and been used
to serve many purposes. When I was a kid, in the woebegotten 1960s,
the Left had managed to turn it into a kind of a proto-socialist dialectic
: "He robs from the rich and gives to the poor." They read the story,
or read it to us, as one of wealth redistribution. But, perhaps because
I learned my Robin Hood from this film and from the inestimable Sir Walter
Scott's Ivanhoe, I've always though that it worked better, and its
popularity and endurance in the Anglo-Saxon world was more easily explained,
if we look at it as one of the first and probably the greatest of democratic
myths. For, while Robin and his men do steal tax money, they do so
less to help the poor than to ransom King Richard, who was taken hostage
while off crusading. They are not concerned with creating an egalitarian
society, but with the orderly transfer of power by their rulers, with bringing
Richard back home to resume his rightful place on the throne of England.

In the best scene (politically speaking) in this film, and one of the
more conservative scenes ever committed to film, Robin has just met up
with King Richard who is disguised as a cleric. The cowled Richard
plies him with questions about his motives and the topic of Richard himself
comes up. Robin says that he blames Richard for the state of affairs
in England and particularly blames him for creating a situation where ruffians
like Robin and his men have to take the law into their own hands.
Here is the matter in a nutshell, the fight against Prince John has nothing
to do with economics and fairly little to do with the specifics of John's
brutal rule, it is instead a simple matter of upholding the implicitly
agreed upon and explicitly delineated line of succession. Nor do
Robin and his men take undue pride in their activities, recognizing that
their rebellion is a sign of a badly disordered society. When Richard
finally does get back his throne, Robin asks for no reward, other than
Marian's hand in marriage; the return to normalcy is obviously its own
reward.

The other thing I've always loved about the movie is its demonstration
of my own admittedly odd, and more than a little antihistorical, Longbow
Theory of Democracy. This theory holds that it is the development
of cheap but lethal personal arms and their widespread dispersal throughout
English and American society that, as much as anything, explains the unique
rise and maintenance of democracy in the Anglosphere. We're all familiar
here in the States with the Colt .45's affectionate nickname, "The Equalizer".
This sobriquet reflects the idea that a good weapon can make it possible
for inherently unequal or socially disparate men to face one another on
a level playing field. A similar notion is at work, though it is
seldom recognized, in the story of David and Goliath. Forget everything
you've ever been told about David as an underdog and think of him as Indiana
Jones in the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where the giant
scimitar-wielding Arab confronts him in terrifying fashion, only to have
Indy whip out a pistol and shoot him. That's all the story of David
and Goliath really boils down to is the resort to superior technology to
defeat a seemingly more powerful foe. The sling was long recognized
as one of the most lethal and, because of its range, effective weapons
of ancient times. It is only the fact that the slingshot has become
a plaything for growing boys that allows us to misunderstand this story
so badly.

Ranking right up there with the sling and the handgun in terms of low
cost and equalizing power is the longbow. We see this theory brought
to life in Robin Hood, where all the might and armor of Prince John and
the Norman nobles avail them naught against a determined band of men armed
with longbows. Where once the great wealth of the crown made it possible
to hold a populace in bondage, the superior firepower of the longbow creates
a situation in which the people are capable of striking back with a vengeance.
In the film, it is the longbows of Robin and his men that determine who
will rule Britain (though within a narrow range of choices). Within
a few short years, John, who would by then be king in his own right, would
be forced to accept the provisions of the Magna Carta (1215), placing himself
and his successors under the rule of law, and Britain would be launched
upon the long to freedom and democracy.

I'm as big a believer in the power of ideas as anyone, but it seems
obvious that the idea of democracy is not as powerful on its own as it
is when backed by a well-armed citizenry. Somehow the people's ready
access to deadly weapons has always served to focus the concentration of
our leaders quite usefully and made them appropriately concerned with maintaining
our trust. It can hardly be a coincidence that totalitarianism has
been easiest to impose where the people are disarmed and the power of government
is most constrained where rulers truly have to worry about the dissatisfaction
of those they rule. There's a relatively recent movie--not a great
one, but a wise one--that nicely illustrates this point : Red Dawn.
It's a mistake to dismiss this tale of High School students battling Soviet
invaders as merely a Cold War relic. At its heart it is really a
retelling of the Robin Hood myth and reflects a truth that we forget at
our own peril : for centuries now, liberty in the West has been protected
by the guns and arrows of a freedom-loving yeomanry. Such is the
lesson of Robin Hood.